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Cost of running a mastodon instance
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Storage costs should be pretty low for an instance very few would want to use.
suppose I kidnap 1000 people and force them to use mastodon without images, how much will it cost then? jk
In all seriousness, we can't really give a cost estimate because you haven't given us your hosting scenario. Are you hosting on your own hardware, on a VPS, or using a provider that specializes in hosting Mastodon servers?
I am thinking of a VPS so that i can have greater control over instance functionality
https://paulstamatiou.com/hosting-your-own-mastodon-server#choose-how-youd-like-to-host
Digital Ocean is used as an example because they have a quick setup Mastodon option. It looks like $14/mo minimum if you're going to run Elastisearch. Without that tool in memory you might get away with 1GB of memory which is $7/mo. But the author also notes that with Elastisearch his VPS uses about 2GB of ram so he's actually running the 4GB $21/mo plan.
Even without images, you'll still need quite a bit of space. I'm not sure 50GB would cut it for 1000 semi-active users. Also you'll need to pay for the domain name.
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Thanks!!
He also explains how to offload storage to another service for $5 a month if you want to add images back in.